What or where is Hammerspace anyway, and where did that name come from? And what does it have in common with the summer’s biggest blockbuster Spider Man: Across the Spider-Verse?
According to Wikipedia, Hammerspace (the concept) is a “fan envisioned, multidimensional, instantly accessible storage area in fiction, allowing animated characters to produce objects out of thin air.”
We’ve seen this popular fictional trick pop up in many places over the years, such as in the new Spider-Verse movie when John Mulaney’s Spider-Ham character produces a hammer out of thin air, or in an earlier era when Mary Poppins reached into her carpet bag for a floor lamp or hat stand. This ability to manifest something valuable from thin air is a convenient fictional solution to otherwise unsolvable problems in cartoons and films going back to the beginning.
So it is with just the slightest wink and a nod that we called our technology and company Hammerspace. Because with Hammerspace (the technology), enterprises can now solve otherwise intractable data problems by “reaching inside” their existing silos of data on-premises, in the cloud, and/or across multiple locations to get immediate value and solve one of the industry’s biggest problems: Using data when and where you want it no matter where it is stored.
The Hammerspace Data Orchestration System empowers enterprises to realize value from their data by providing global access and data placement to use data created and stored anywhere, with an application or compute environment located anywhere. This allows our customers to create new revenue streams, ensure global data protection, and drive operational efficiency. With non-disruptive, metadata-driven data orchestration even on live data, Hammerspace enables customers to unlock the value of their unstructured data across the enterprise.
Creating a single real-time global namespace for collaboration from applications or remote users anywhere using data-in-place on any storage from any vendor across multiple silos, locations, and cloud providers, Hammerspace immediately transforms fragmented digital assets into a seamless global data environment that can scale from very small use cases all the way up to include even the very largest datasets in the world. From a disparate collection of multi-vendor storage repositories, Hammerspace enables IT organizations global access and control that seamlessly spans them all with the power of metadata.
Use your data where you want, when you want
When digital assets are fragmented, your organization’s potential for transformation is hidden within volumes of unstructured data that may be distributed across silos, or even across the world.
With Hammerspace, data that was otherwise scattered, and often lost, not findable or very difficult to move, across silos can now be transformed into a global resource, no longer localized within incompatible storage platforms or locations. This empowers organizations to readily utilize all their data, bridging users, applications, and infrastructure from any vendor, and which may be located anywhere in the world. This power means customers are no longer limited by proximity to the infrastructure holding their data, or locked into specific vendors even for high-performance workflows.
The mission of Hammerspace (the company) is to empower enterprises to realize the value in unstructured data across the organization, regardless of which platform or location it is on today, or needs to move to in the future. Data is the lifeblood of every business; it’s just a matter of being able to seamlessly access it all across the inevitable silos. That is, to enable customers to extract the full value held within those digital assets, reducing the friction and cost that has traditionally been the struggle in siloed environments in all industries.
Just as with the fictional hammerspace concept, many vendors are trying (and struggling) to produce that magical, metaphorical anvil or hammer from off screen or out of a bag of tricks. Until now, this has often resulted in a patchwork of multiple infrastructure-bound point solutions that enterprises have relied on to meet demands for data storage, protection, security, and cross-platform file access. But such point solutions add IT complexity, can create vendor lock-in, and typically compound the headache and expense of creating file copies that proliferate across silos and sites. What’s worse, all of this fragmentation causes security challenges in data management and data access, which makes workflow automation all but impossible.
Hammerspace simplifies and often eliminates this fragmented collection of point solutions with a software-defined data orchestration system that includes a comprehensive set of global data services that can bridge storage silos from any vendor.
So while Hammerspace software may not help you pull a rabbit out of a hat, it is a software-designed solution that can feel magical by giving you the ability to pull the maximum value from your digital assets across an entire global data environment that can span vendor silos, clouds, and locations.